1.Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to process and apparatus, to be used in or as a portion of a man-machine interface system, for allowing or assisting an operator to input information into an input area among a plurality of input areas, respectively provided for a plurality of information items, in a display screen. A typical example of such an input area is a "control", which is defined by Microsoft Corporation, for example, in "Windows 95 Software Development Kit For Far East, .alpha. version". Namely, the "control" may be a child window in a dialog box or another window, and the child window may be an "edit control (text box)", into which a text (sequence of characters, numbers, and/or symbols) can be inserted; or a "list box" or a group of "option buttons", or a group of "check boxes", where in each of the "list box", a group of "option buttons", and a group of "check boxes" a plurality of optional items are listed for an operator to select one among the plurality of optional items. The process according to the present invention comprises a series of specific operational steps to be performed on or with the aid of a computer, and the apparatus according to the present invention is a computer or other programmable apparatus whose actions are directed by a computer program or other form of software (for example, hardware logic circuitry). The present invention also relates to a computer-readable memory (or computer-readable data storage medium) which stores a program such that a computer used with the computer-readable memory executes the above process according to the present invention, and functions as the above apparatus according to the present invention. Although all of the explanations in this specification are provided for the Windows system, it will be apparent that all of the matters explained in this specification based on the Windows system, can be easily applied to another graphic user interface (GUI) system, for example, used in the Macintosh system, the UNIX system, the OS/2 system, and the like.
2.Description of the Related Art
In the Windows system, when a dialog box contains a plurality of controls such as edit controls and/or list boxes, an input focus is given to one of the controls (in other words, one of the controls is designated as a control which can receive information input from an operator) by clicking an area of the control by a mouse, or pressing a TAB key on a keyboard, where the location of the input focus cyclically moves from one control to another when the TAB key is pressed. Namely, in the conventional Windows system, when an operator wishes to change the location of the input focus, an operator must repeatedly press the TAB key until the location of the input focus reaches the control into which the operator wishes to input information, after the cyclical moving of the input focus, or the operator must move his or her hand away from the keyboard to find, move and click a mouse, and move the hand back to the keyboard for keyboard operations following the mouse operation for changing the location of the input focus.
Therefore, according to the conventional Windows system, the operators are bothered with troublesome operations to change the location of the input focus in a dialog box or in a window.